'Max' fails to get a grip on essence of Hitler

By WILLIAM ARNOLD, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Updated 10:00 pm, Thursday, March 6, 2003

The 1991 documentary, "The Architecture of Doom," makes a compelling case that the key to understanding the dark phenomenon of Adolf Hitler is that he was a frustrated artist, and his creation of the Third Reich was, in effect, a demented artistic creation.

"Max," a what-if drama set in Berlin at the end of World War I and filmed in Hungary by first-time director Menno Meyjes (the screenwriter of Spielberg's "The Color Purple" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade") basically makes this same case, but not nearly as convincingly.

Its title character (John Cusack) is a fictional contrivance: a wealthy German Jewish veteran who lost an arm in the war and has just opened an art gallery in an abandoned Berlin factory where he stages Dada performance art and the grimly abstract work of the new German Expressionists.

One day, a surly ex-corporal and aspiring artist named Hitler (Noah Taylor) comes to his back door and, even though his pastoral paintings are way out of step with the times, Max feels sorry for him and takes him under his wing. ("You're a hard man to like, Hitler, but I'm going to try.")

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At the same time, a right-wing officer and leader of the fledgling National Socialist Party also sees potential in young Hitler, and the movie becomes a contest for his soul between Max, who wants him to put his anger on canvas, and the Nazi, who wants him to put it in the streets.

No doubt about it, the movie is morbidly fascinating. Moreover, Cusack gives a delicate and agreeably world-weary performance, Meyjes' script makes some good points about the ambiguous nature of art, and Lajos Koltai's camera skillfully captures a Berlin about to burst into its "Cabaret" era.

But "Max" has precious little sting as a morality tale or punch as a parable about the relationship of art to politics. It also can't resist littering its landscape with the most groaningly contrived and apocryphal dialogue. ("Who is this artist Hitler? I've never heard of him." "You will." )

And Taylor is all wrong as Hitler. The real thing was said to invariably be the most charming man in the room, with a diplomat's power of persuasion. Here he's Count Dracula, a slobbering maniac with the charisma of a toad, and the only man in the entire cast who speaks with a German accent.